News

SLAM researchers awarded Australian Research Council funding

By Sarah Taylor

15 November, 2013

ARC funding has been awarded to researchers in the departments of Art History and Film Studies, English and Media and Communications.

Future Fellowship

Professor Gerard Goggin (Media and Communications, $909,377), has received a Future Fellowship for a project offering the first comprehensive investigation of how we invent, design, implement, and regulate technology for people with disabilities. Disability is a major area of Australian reform, and digital technology is key to securing historic goals of full social participation. This project will provide a theory of disability and technology, with case studies including mobile phones, e-readers, and health technologies. It will also examine human rights aspects of technology in the United Nations disability convention and their relation to global media policy, and propose better ways to align human rights frameworks, policy and technology design to ensure digital participation for Australians with disability.

Discovery Projects

This project will investigate and account for a radically underestimated aspect of our intellectual and literary culture, the public lecture, focusing specifically on public lecturing in the Romantic period and on the lecture institutions that sprang up in the early nineteenth century. It will examine, amongst other things, the role public lectures played in the (self-) education of women and the development of 'English' as a discipline. This will be he first ever comprehensive study of an extensive pedagogical practice that was also a popular diversion. This project will position public lecturing in the history of education and the knowledge economy of the early nineteenth century.

This project will generate a new understanding of patterns of collecting and interpreting the arts of the near east through the first cross-cultural comparative study of Ottoman and Orientalist artists as collectors in the 19th century. By mapping transcultural networks of artists, dealers and collectors traversing Ottoman, Russian, Polish, French and British cultures, this study reveals international exchanges that have been occluded by studies of Orientalism narrowly focused around single national histories. This project reveals the myriad ways treasures from the Islamic world were being transformed in the 19th century from their prior local religious and cultural functions into exoticism in the West and cultural patrimony in the East.

Professor Emeritus John Clark (Art History and Film Studies) is a co-investigator with Professor Adrian Vickers (School of Languages and Cultures), Dr Thomas Berghuis and Dr Agung Hujatnika on the project Shaping Indonesian Contemporary Art: The Role of Institutions ($305,000). In the absence of the kinds of public grants programs and arts institutions that support contemporary art in the West, this project will examine what the major structures are within Indonesia that shape the choices of artists, wupport their work economically, and determine what is presented to the world as “contemporary Indonesian art”.

Professor John Frow (English) is a co-investigator with Dr Justin Clemens and Dr Thomas Apperley on the project Avatars and Identities ($170,000, administered by the University of Melbourne) investigating – through a historical, ethnographic and critical analysis – the role of the avatar in order to further understand the full range of social implications of its use.

Dr Lisa Beaven – who will be joining the Department of Art History and Film Studies in 2014 – was awarded funding for her project with Associate Professor Angela Ndalianis on the relationship between the historical baroque and the neo-baroque using the cities of Roma and Las Vegas as case studies ($145,000, administered by the University of Melbourne).

Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF)

Professor Mark Ledbury (Art History and Film Studies, $190,000 administered by UNSW) is part of a team of researchers awarded funding to improve the Design and Art Australia Online (DAAO) database. This will enable data repurposing for visualisation, automation of the linking facility between established entity links, and developing researcher collaboration functionalities.